Since Renault’s contract with Red Bull and Toro Rosso is set to expire after the 2016 season, Bernie Ecclestone is pushing the French manufacturer into investing in their own team.
What this would mean for Red Bull & Toro Rosso is unclear at the moment, but if that happens, odds are they will take over Lotus since talks between the two companies are believed to be at an advanced level, and Lotus are indeed a very strong performing team – generally speaking.
Ecclestone was quoted as saying that they [Renault] “were going to have a look at it and hopefully come up with a decision by September.”
When asked about what he’d like to see Renault do, Ecclestone said that he’d like them to either “take over Lotus or start a new company on their own. I’d rather not lose them because they’ve been with us a long time and they are easy people to deal with, nice people, there are no dramas anywhere.”
The problem with Lotus right now is debt. Renault doesn’t want to take it on so it’s a matter of “hoping the people that put the debt in will write the debt off,” according to Ecclestone.
As fans, we’d much rather see Lotus continue to develop using Mercedes engines and hopefully return to their glory days as themselves and not a Renault Works team.
For Renault, it would be equally rewarding to return to Formula 1 and capture the form that brought them driver and constructor championships in 2005 and 2006.
In fact, they had a nice 8 year run between 2002 and 2010 and we hope to see them back beyond 2016.
Story references: autosport